This isn’t really new. I’ve been writing for a while about how the financial schemes in Afghanistan worked.
The Taliban weren’t making money from drug sales, but from ‘taxing’ foreign aid even long before they officially took over.
We don’t know exactly how much taxpayer money went to the Taliban, but one survey found that contractors priced in 20% to 30% from their contracts as payoffs. More formally, the Taliban tend to charge a 10% Islamic tax on income and a 2.5% Islamic wealth tax.
The Taliban had an extensive and sophisticated tax collection network long before they took Kabul which included all the usual elements of bureaucracy, registration, certificates, and assessments. They even have “NGO coordinators” who work with non-profit groups.
As an Economist article noted, “Britain’s Foreign Office had to remind ngos not to pay taxes to the Taliban.”
The Taliban at one point provided a list of non-profits that had registered with their Commission for the Arrangement and Control of Companies and Organisations. The group “included UN agencies, national and international NGOs and human rights organisations” including those that “rely on funding from a wide range of sources, including both the UN and the US government”.
That was back in 2013 when the Taliban had far less power and were less intimidating.
That is what’s in it for the Taliban, that’s in it for the UN? Also money.
Corrupt United Nations officials in Afghanistan have stolen U.S. assistance by demanding bribes to allow the aid money to flow, an American inspector general charged Wednesday.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said senior U.N. officials “personally profit” from the influx of assistance flowing into the troubled nation by taking advantage of a persistent pay-to-play culture.
Ten people, including a current U.N. official and a former official, confirmed the bribes.
The U.N. officials connect those with the money to the organizations that deliver the services. It’s those nongovernmental organizations that pay the bribes to win the contracts.
And we pay the organizations.
Several people reported that the U.N. officials were collaborating with the Taliban, the fundamentalist sect that took control of the Afghan government in 2021. That includes payments and, in some cases, demands that Taliban officials or their relatives be added as shareholders or board members of the nongovernmental organizations.
“Interviewees told SIGAR that UN officials demand bribes from companies and NGOs seeking contracts from their agencies. They said that these are calculated as a percentage of the contract at stake, with estimates varying between 5 and 50 percent,” the inspector general said in a report.
All of that is absolutely typical, not just in Afghanistan, but Gaza, Yemen and any other terrorist-controlled territory.
The standard operating procedure is to fake a humanitarian crisis, then control and resell the aid that comes in, and/or demand a cut from the organizations on the ground. On top of that these organizations have to hire terrorists so that before long, the aid groups are just an employment agency for terrorists.
That’s the way it is in Gaza where Hamas runs the so-called aid groups on the ground which is why they keep hysterically demanding that Hamas be left alone… and why Hamas demands that the UN be in charge of aid.
But it’s not just Afghanistan or Gaza, it’s every place controlled by Muslim terrorists. That’s why we really have to get out of the business of sending aid into terrorist states because we’re funding and employing Islamic terrorists.
